Online communications are an important collaboration technique for real time collaboration, which is also known as chat communications, and information sharing between individuals. In a real time collaboration (also referred to as a collaborative browsing session or co-browsing session), participants each participate on respective computers and communicate with each other through a network. Although chat sessions may include a large group of participants, chat sessions may consist of as few as two participants. Chat sessions are utilized for a variety of different types of environments. For example chat sessions may be used for customer service support, business consultation, academic meetings, and more. These chat sessions provide a quick means to exchange information which may be difficult to exchange through more traditional avenues of real time collaboration. It is common for participants to discuss specific content, such as a webpage or document, in an online chat. In this scenario, a participant may send a uniform resource locater (URL) to the other participants in the chat session, and may focus the chat on a specific section of content in the webpage.
It is known to have co-browsing chat sessions where multiple users (see the DEFINITIONS sub-section of the DETAILED DESCRIPTION section) co-operatively browse a computer network, such as the internet. These co-browsing sessions: (i) may be performed through a “chat type” interface; (ii) are usually co-operative in nature; (iii) may have different predesignated “roles” for the co-browser users; (iv) may use a system of roles that includes the roles of “leader” and “non-leader;” and/or (v) may allow only one user to assume the role of leader at any given time during the co-browsing session. For co-browsing systems with leaders, it is a known technique to change the leader of the session by a specific and overt request from one of the users of the co-browsing session.